1 John 3:1-10

The Voice

3 Consider the kind of extravagant love the Father has lavished on us—He calls us children of God! It’s true; we are His beloved children. And in the same way the world didn’t recognize Him, the world does not recognize us either.

² My loved ones, we have been adopted into God’s family; and we are officially His children now. The full picture of our destiny is not yet clear, but we know this much: when Jesus appears, we will be like Him because we will see Him just as He is. ³ All those who focus their hopes on Him and His coming seek to purify themselves just as He is pure.

⁴ Everyone who lives a life of habitual sin is living in moral anarchy. That’s what sin is. ⁵ You realize that He came to eradicate sins, that there is not the slightest bit of sin in Him. ⁶ The ones who live in an intimate relationship with Him do not persist in sin, but anyone who persists in sin has not seen and does not know the real Jesus.

⁷ Children, don’t let anyone pull one over on you. The one doing the right thing is just imitating Jesus, the Righteous One.

⁸ The one persisting in sin belongs to the diabolical one, who has been all about sin from the beginning. That is why the Son of God came into our world: to destroy the plague of destruction inflicted on the world by the diabolical one.

⁹ Everyone who has been born into God’s family avoids sin as a lifestyle because the genes of God’s children come from God Himself. Therefore, a child of God can’t live a life of persistent sin. ¹⁰ So it is not hard to figure out who are the children of God and who are the children of the diabolical one: those who lack right standing and those who don’t show love for one another do not belong to God.